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Jul 29, 2013

Remove Color Cast in Photoshop Using Complimentary Colors

How to Remove Color Cast in Photoshop

A color cast on your photos can show up in a number of ways. Sometimes your white balance will be off when you took the photo. In that case it is better to use the white balance slider in your RAW processor. RAW processors include Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One etc…

If you have a Color cast that is a result of a Light being a different color than the rest of the Lights in the image, you will need to get a bit more in Depth when editing to remove it. That is what today’s episode is all about.

Using Complimentary Colors

Often times in Photoshop we will try to take care of a Color cast by selecting that color and trying to manipulate it. There is another great way to work with Colors, and that is using their Complimentary Colors. Complimentary Colors when added together in a 50/50 ratio will cancel each other out, leaving you with a neutral grayscale tone.

In this episode we show you some very simple methods for using complimentary Colors to cancel out a color cast. Our goal is to completely get rid of the green cast on this photo and replace it with neutral Skin tones. This is not that easy to do, but follow along with today’s episode and you will be well on your way to removing color casts!

Choosing Channels

We don’t cover this often on Phlearn because there are not many times when you will need to limit the Color Channels a layer will effect. In today’s episode we show you a great example on how you can limit the Color Channels resulting in even more control over how your layers will effect color.

I photographed a friend and his cousins and they wanted to do the cheasy lying on lawn facing the camera shot (I loved it). They all had a green colour cast from the light reflected by the grass and wanted it removed from the photo. Phlearn was the first thing I thought of checking when I needed to learn how to fix this. Thank you so much. 🙂

Aaron I’ve learnt a lot here in Italy from your tutorials and you are great because you know how to keep your listeners with their eyes peeled on you, but please change the word “complimentary” in “complementary” for this tutorial, it does not add anything important, but it looks gramatically better.
However I still love your gait in your video tutorials, your vast knowledge of PP and your simple way of teaching difficult concepts. Thanks a lot

Thank You!!! I take pictures of my son’s band playing in a lot of dive bars and the red color cast from the stage floods have been driving me crazy. I’ve just been using the H/S/L sliders to try and get it out but this method does the trick so much better and faster. This tutorial is bookmarked until I get everything memorized!